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Cisco Amongst Latest Hardware Manufacturers to Back Away from Cloud

It wasn't long ago when cloud computing was the hottest topic around. Despite its continued growth around the world, some companies, including Cisco, have already withdrawn their own service offerings in the volatile and largely unexplored niche.

Cisco isn't pulling out of the cloud computing race altogether. While they will be abandoning their Intercloud concept in early 2017, which only broke ground a few short years ago, the company has also announced plans to maintain their industry presence through dedicated cloud management services.

A representative with Cisco explained their recent announcement in an email to Business Insider, where they explained: "Cisco has internally communicated that we are discontinuing one of our internal cloud platforms and will be transitioning affected workloads onto other platforms. We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition. For the last several months we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this."

Killing Off the Competition

There are a number of factors that contribute to the failure of Cisco's Intercloud. For starters, the sheer amount of resources need to oversee such a vast network are more than an industry giant like Cisco can even offer. Moreover, the massive amount of resources that would be spent on the Intercloud project could be diverted toward other areas of business.

Many point to the amount of competition as well as the veracity of the top names in cloud computing. With the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud rounding out the frontrunners, this can be a difficult area to succeed.

Hewlett-Packard even gave up on their venture in cloud computing in 2015 as well as their Helion service in 2016. As you can see, the industry has a way of challenging even the most hardened of brands.

Already Making Moves in the Right Direction

Considering some of the recent announcements coming from Cisco as of late, it seems the closure of the Intercloud wasn't entirely unexpected. The company successfully acquired a number of companies in 2016, including CloudLock, ContainerX and Cliqr. All of these technologies are expected to play a role in Cisco's future service offerings.

To clarify any concerns that they might be leaving the niche of cloud computing for good, Cisco even released details on two brand new services that are meant to facilitate cloud accessibility and cloud-based deployment on behalf of their customers.

Firstly, Cisco will provide customized assistance in the non-technical side of cloud adoption. This includes initial application planning, timeline development and more. Their second service, a complementary offering, provides hands-on assistantce with the development of platform-as-a-service features.

Shaking Up the Industry

Although they haven't given up on the industry as a whole, Cisco has certainly made headlines by pulling support for their highly touted Intercloud services. With a relatively small amount of cloud service offerings available as of today, and as that number seems to decline instead of grow, it's safe to say that we'll be seeing the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google for some time to come.